With the widespread proliferation of applications such as games, organizers, user interface applications, and the like, for portable electronic devices, wireless communication devices, cellular handsets, and the like, and with the familiarity of using standard input devices such as keypad, joysticks, touch pads etc., providing input signals to such applications in an easy and convenient manner has become an important factor in product usability and enjoyment.
Portable communication devices, because of their small size, often suffer limitations in the manner in which the user navigates menus, enters data, or otherwise provides input to applications running thereon. To overcome such limitations voice tags are commonly used in communication devices. Voice tags use speech recognition to recognize a voice signal, where the voice signal is matched to a previously trained voice tag pattern and executes an associated function. Although the voice modality, as is used in voice tags is a natural way to control a communication device, there are other input modalities that are available. For example, some communication devices are equipped with an accelerometer for sensing motion, vibration, shock or tilt of the device. In another example, a communication device equipped with a camera can capture movement, gesture, or text. As more and more input modalities are being added to the communication devices each day, improved and more convenient means of providing input signals is envisaged.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method and apparatus for enabling multimodal tags in a communication device.
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The apparatus and method components have been represented where appropriate by conventional symbols in the drawings, showing only those specific details that are pertinent to understanding the embodiments of the present invention so as not to obscure the disclosure with details that will be readily apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art having the benefit of the description herein.